Category Archives: Personal Productivity

Kick the Clutter to Reverse a Bad Day

Personal Productivity

Bad day? Frustrated?

I’ve found a few times that I can get through one of those days by finding those chores that I put off. You know the ones I mean … paying bills, calling about the insurance, scanning documents, keeping the books, organizing emails … these are all things I know I have to do, but I avoid. Everything else seems more important. clutter

Then one day, when I’m annoyed over something, or fighting inertia, I go straight into that pile of boring and annoying tasks, and whittle it down. I don’t try for the brilliant piece of writing, or the great product idea, or anything excellent. I settle for reducing the pile of the stuff I avoid.

And, strangely enough,that seems to kick me out of the doldrums, and get me going again.

(image: istockphoto.com)

I’m Loving the New Version of Business Plan Pro

Business Planning, Personal Productivity, Plan-as-you-go Planning, Planning Process, Self Promotion, Software, , ,

If you’re a regular reader you know I don’t normally do sales pitches here on this blog, but this is special. Last week Palo Alto Software introduced a brand new version of Business Plan Pro incorporating (finally) my Plan-as-You-Go Business Planning ideas into the mainstream of the software.

With this new version, when you start a new plan, Plan as You Go is the first choice for setting up a simple, practical, management-oriented business plan. Not the whole big formal document plan, but just what you need to run a business with. That’s the key screen above (with my annotations in red):

Now the new built-in option is exactly what I suggested in the book: a streamlined, practical outline, shown here on the right. Of course you can add more later and eventually make a larger business plan, but you do that as the business plan events happen, not before. So you add the embellishment, like description of management team, or exit strategy, only when you need it. Which is great, because a lot of people really don’t need it.

I wrote the book in 2008, but because we’ve been busy with liveplan, the new online web business planning, our mainstream software had to wait. So now I’m celebrating that it’s finally here.

We’ve also added a lot of video at many different points, so that – if you’re online – you get me talking about what you’re looking at, in very short snippets. That’s hard for me to watch, frankly, because I’m as self-conscious as anybody else … but as an author, I love the opportunity to talk to you while you’re working with what I wrote.

This is the 12th version of Business Plan Pro since the first one was published late in 1994, and actually hit the shelves in 1995. We’ve come a long way since the first one – it’s still my business planning advice, but I wrote a third of the code in the original, and now there’s a team of a dozen programmers – which makes it way better.

And, by the way, if you prefer an online version, or you’re a Mac user, there’s also a lot of my methodology and my instructions in the new online planning web app at www.liveplan.com.

For more information click here for the website or call them toll-free at 1 (800) 229-7526.

Magic of Metrics. Tyranny of Metrics. Management of Metrics

Advice, Personal Productivity, Reflections, ,

The tyranny of metrics is that I keep looking at my page views on this blog, my subscriber count, my Klout score, my blog rating, and I can’t stop. I have to keep blogging, tweeting, and conversing, or else it goes down. There is no taking a pause, no relaxation, or my rating goes down. There’s even that Small Business Influencers voting going on right now, and I’m watching that too. measurement

Before that it was unit sales of Business Plan Pro, web views, conversion rates, and profits. And before that it was sales and profits in earlier jobs, column inches published, newspapers using UPI vs. AP, GPA in grad school, GPA in college, GMAT and SAT, GPA in high school.

It never ends. Did you think when you got out of high school you’d be able to forget metrics like GPA or SAT? Or that when you got out of college you’d be able to forget that GPA and the GMAT? Probably not.

Which is also the magic of metrics too. Because most of us don’t want the numbers to end. “Immeasurement,” as Patrick Lencioni calls it, makes us miserable.

Patrick is the author of  The Three Signs of a Miserable Job. And he says most people want and need and want our metrics. “Immeasurement” makes us miserable. Here’s a quote from a blog post he wrote:Miserablejob

All human beings in any kind of a job need some way to assess their own performance that’s objective. It might not be numerical or easily quantitative, but it’s somewhat objective and observable by them, because then they are not left to depend upon the opinion or the whim of a manager once a year during a performance appraisal. People need to be able to go home from work every night, or every week, or every month, and know where they stand, and know what they can do to influence how they’re working.

So yes, metrics are pushy, but yes, metrics help you and others to care about what you do. You want your numbers going up. And you want your peers to see your numbers going up.  And that leads us directly to the management benefits of simple metrics. If there is some objective score to keep, then it’s objective, it’s motivating, and it helps us manage a team. To me, that’s supposed to be in the live business planning that sets up metrics and gets reviewed regularly. Others might call that a scorecard system, or critical factors … there are lots of ways to develop that same core function of metrics and management.

So choose the right numbers to follow.

The Brain Scientist’s Insight From Inside Out

Advice, Creativity, Personal Productivity, Reflections, , , , ,

She’s a brain scientist who studied the brain “from inside out” when she had a stroke. We should listen to what she discovered. And what we have to choose from.

http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf

If you don’t see the video embedded here, you can click this link to go to the original on TED.com.

Folk Wisdom Reversal: Necessity Isn’t the Mother of Invention

Personal Productivity, Productivity Software, Reflections, , , , , , , , ,

This will be hard for anybody under 50 to believe, but there was a time when word processing and spreadsheets were a real productivity advantage.

Are you old enough to remember Visicalc, or maybe SuperCalc? In the very early 1980s, most business people still did budgets with paper and calculator. The spreadsheet power user was way faster than anybody else. It was a great secret weapon for early adopters. It was a huge productivity boost.

Now, of course, we take it for granted. People throw multi-worksheet budgets around like nerf balls. If you’re not done in an hour, well, what’s wrong with you?

It was the same back then with word processing. Are you old enough to remember WordStar? That was power when the competition was working with typewriters. Now, you write fast … so what? So does everybody. Go write your big email and come back in 10 minutes.

Then came desktop publishing in 1985. Can you remember Aldus Pagemaker and the first Apple Laserwriter. It was amazing. Any one person could compete with the graphics department.

And slides? There was Aldus Persuasion, replaced later by Microsoft PowerPoint. When I was with McKinsey Management Consulting back in the early 1980s our office had more graphic artists than consultants, because they had to produce the slides that amazed the clients. How long has it been since anybody was amazed by a slide deck?

Do you see what I mean? At first it’s slick and powerful, doing something way faster than the old way of doing it. And that’s productivity at its best. But soon the advances are taken for granted. The bar of expectations goes up, and you spend the same amount of time.

Which is why the saying is reversed. In these cases, it’s not like it’s supposed to be, necessity as the mother of invention. Invention becomes the mother of necessity.

Does All Of This Improve Productivity?

That’s an interesting question. Ten years ago I would have been tempted to say no, that it hasn’t improved productivity.  More recently I’ve changed my mind.  Running a company makes me sure that we benefit from the power of more detailed budgeting, and running through the daily process of management makes me pretty sure that business documents are generally better communicators with desktop publishing than without.

And the new world of social media, infinite communications possibilities, authenticity and content quality threatening to become more powerful than huge advertising budgets?

What do you think?

(Image: JuditK/Flickr cc)

5 Survival Tips for Work Overload

Personal Productivity

I like Nate Riggs’ 5 Survival Tips for Work Overload over at Nate Riggs & Social Business Strategies. These are pretty good tips, and we all need reminders. This is just a summary, Nate has a lot more on the original post.

  • Forget about emptying your email inbox.
  • Set a reasonable task list by day.
  • Limit your distractions, but don’t abandon your daily routine.
  • Cancel or reschedule meetings that don’t directly impact what’s on your to-do list.
  • Force downtime upon yourself.

Sounds good, right? I can’t say I buy all of Nate’s related explanations. For example, for email, he says:

parse through quickly, flag everything that requires a more detailed follow-up and respond with a short message that lets the sender know that you received the message and will be back in touch later when you can devote your attention to the response they need.

I don’t have anything better to suggest, and I’m the last one to be telling anybody how to get through email. Still, the flag-for-later idea would be disastrous with me. I’d end up with a string of broken promises.

My favorite is his explanation of the need for downtime. This is right on:

It sounds counterintuitive, right? The truth is that when you are overloaded, your stress levels are completely out of whack. That can effect everything, including the way you interact with your family members, coworkers and friends. It can also effect your decision-making ability and creativity. When your plate is full, make an investment in your own well-being and take one evening or even just a few hours to blow off steam. Go to the gym, take your kids to a movie, go to dinner with your significant other – do anything that makes you happy and is not related to your work.

Amen to that one.

But reschedule meetings that don’t directly affect your to-do list? Fat chance. Not if there’s more than one person on your team.

And on his explanation of avoiding distractions (watch for the irony here, please) I have a couple of comments. First, here’s what Nate says:

For us social media-friendly folks, participating on Twitter and Facebook or even staying on top of blog content is a core part of how we function as professionals. Shutting it off completely is not really an option. Instead of eliminating social media participation from your routine, moderate it. If you are doing presence building on Twitter through distribution, cut the amount of articles or posts you distribute in half. You might try checking your HootSuite dashboard or Tweetdeck three times a day, rather than having it run all day long in the background. Write easier and shorter blogs posts. Using lists and video posts or even featuring other people’s content on your blog – with your reaction – is a way to save time on the research and writing you will do.

My answer to that specific suggestion:

  1. Whoops, there goes your Klout score! and …
  2. Look, he he , with this post, I just did exactly what Nate recommends in his last sentence.

(Image: diez artwork/Shutterstock)

Productivity is as Productivity Does

Management, Personal Productivity, ,

Work differs. The other day somebody told me about the problem of getting into some kinds of work. It went something like this (paraphrasing):

With computer programming it takes more time to get in and out of it. You can’t just stop to talk, or answer an instant message, and then continue. Interruptions make a huge difference. With regular management it doesn’t matter as much.

And that strikes me as true for several kinds of work. Writing a book, designing websites, and creating an original business plan are some things I’ve done that suffer the same need.

And management, on the other hand, is a hodgepodge collection of quick tasks and constant interruption. Distraction can be a problem sometimes, but it’s much more the rule than the exception. Emails and instant messages and quick conversations are the bricks and mortar of the management job.

In the concentrated content-creation work, interruptions are death to productivity. In management work, interruptions are the essence of productivity. I think I know: I’ve done both for decades.

A lot of us have the interesting problem of doing both. Is that you? Do you manage and create, as part of the same job? Lots of expert businesses, the bloggers, coaches, or consultants, are in that boat. Do you think you need to set aside separate blocks of time for writing, or other content work? Would it work to divide your day into pieces?

Wishing You’d Had The Perfect Response?

Advice, Business Mistakes, Personal Productivity, ,

… you can often go back later and change what you said.

Do you know what I refer to? Some exchange in the workplace, it all happens very quickly, and later you find yourself wishing you’d said something else, or something different? You don’t like your answer, but the moment has passed.

If you don’t have any idea what I’m talking about, then you’re very lucky. You have great instinct. Enjoy it.

If you do, then consider this advice: a lot of times you can go back later and reopen that conversation. You can revise what you said. You do get a second chance. No, not always; and you can’t unsay anything anymore than you can unring a bell.

I don’t know why it is, but I’m sure a lot of us think conversations, once had, are locked up and closed. Not always. Try it some time. Go back later and revisit that same issue, but with a changed mind. Try this:

“You know, I’ve been thinking about what we said the other day, about _____, and I think we missed something.”

Or maybe it’s as simple as saying “I think I got it wrong” or “I think we both missed something.”

We live in a very fast world. It’s hard to get everything right the first time through. Some people are better at the initial go-around, and some people take more time to digest.

So do yourself a favor. If you with you’d handled it differently, don’t give it up entirely. Reopen it and add some more conversation to it.

Charting the Lesson of Wikipedia’s Jimmy Appeal

Business Ethics, Business Financing, Marketing, Personal Productivity, , ,

Yesterday I posted here David McCandless’ fascinating 18-minute talk on data visualization, in which he puts up charts and graphs as a window into patterns and relationships in numbers.

Watching that talk led me to discover his Information is Beautiful blog, which is a great source of ideas and insights.

For example, the chart shown here, from that blog, titled The Science Behind Wikipedia’s Jimmy Appeal:

business chart

That’s just one recent example. Fascinating stuff.

The Beauty Of Data Visualization

Personal Productivity, Writing, , , , ,

I really like business charts. I think I always have. I’ve been in the business of communicating about numbers for a long time. And here is a master of it. David McCandless, a British journalist, also calls himself “a data detective,” and we see why in his Ted talk shown here, The Beauty Of Data Visualization.

This is spectacular thinking. Watch for his visual patterns of fear, of global spending, even of relationships breaking up.

http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf

If for any reason you can’t see this here, you can click here for the source on the TED.com site.